At random hours of the night
I'll send you a joke
Because I wake up from nightmares
Where you've been ripped from my life

I'm trapped inside a house with spiders
Surrounded by canary-colored walls
I'm afraid of Virginia Woolf
and all the words she ever wrote
I don't want to feel such things anymore

You call me up
But don't say a thing
Should I say something?
What's there to say?
Would it change your mind?
Would it make a difference?

I'm too old to pretend
On the midnight train
I'm too old to believe
I know we won't make it to the end of the line

When I say, when I say, when I say...
My whispers could never be louder than all the politics (Suicidal thoughts)
I'm met with silence
What you mean, what you mean, what you mean
Will always be..." Goodbye"

What do I know?
I'm afraid of Virginia Woolf
What was I thinking?
and all the words she ever wrote

At random hours of the night
I'll send you a joke
Because I wake up from nightmares
Where you've been ripped from my life

Water for ink
stains my toes
biro blue
my ending written
casting words before me
gently bobbing
floating flowers
on the sea of self destruction
curled petals
which read
not yet

The first thing I see
when I pull out the top drawer
was the diagnosis. Meds, there you go

it pretty much said that.
I wondered about all the
creative people doing
some remarkable things,
creating and being alive.

Except they all one day
killed themselves.
Van Gogh stood in
the overgrown field before
he shot himself.
Sylvia Plath knelt down
and stuck her head in the oven.
Virginia Woolf grazed the smooth
peebles, thinking about what
she would write about those peebles,
Only to shove them in
her pockets and drown in the Ouse river.

Nearly everyday, I tell myself
I want to be a writer, or an artist-
Both, actually. That’s all I ever
wanted to be, but the fear of
spiraling, and becoming them
Is deeply disturbing.

Yet, I craved for this life,
To paint, and create stories
with a dash of madness
They all did likewise.

A cross. A crossroads.
The desire to erupt.
If the world were red and brown—
If. Jarr
it open.
Resist and grind.

The clouds were piped
by God. Onto the sky.
To forget the tombstones—
To remember the tomb.
Round it out and fluff.
Depress into the ground,
fellow bush.

Squeeze the spire.
Steal it of breath.
And then hear it gasp.
Pull the green
over its head.

The purple desire.
A vortex of lust.
If the clam were to shut
on the fingers of a plate,
then what is the pearl? A rooster?
A blue embrace.

The plates are traps.

Let me sink like a smooth river stone
An illusion of solid and smooth perfection
Yet a mere chunk of matter
The result of many falls and stumbles
Years of immersion at the surface
Of a relentless and powerful stream

Displace every bit of oxygen within me
Fill my body with water
Suffocate every bit of my existence
Intoxicate every ounce of red fluid with acid
Until this burden that beats within me is defeated
The invasion that frees my soul

We've grown distant
two lonely lighthouses
in the middle of the ocean
our glow shining away
from each other

Sailors come for safety
little did they know

We are searching for
the light too.

Mozart,
deaf,
died, eventually.

Picasso, pervert, died; Whitney, Winehouse, drugs, dead; Elvis, Methamphetamine, died

(on the toilet).

Van Gogh,
missing an earlobe,
died.

Plath,
head in an oven,
in front of her kids,
Woolf
Patron saint of insanity, I guess
waded into a river and-

River. River Phoenix. Drugs.

Natalie Merchant wrote that song about him in 1995.

Flash forward.
Me, twenty-one, drunk.
Proprietor of a collection of lackluster poems.
Sold their small, nonbinary soul to the Devil
in exchange for a fortune,
gone.